Environmentalists opposed to France's nuclear tests in the South Pacific swamped the main post office Saturday with hundreds of bundles of petitions addressed to President Jacques Chirac.
Worldwide, nations condemned the underground blast Friday on Mururoa Atoll in French Polynesia - France's third nuclear test in a series that began in September. On Thursday, Chirac said there probably would be six tests in all, down from eight as originally planned.About 50 Greenpeace activists took the main post office near the Louvre by surprise Saturday, depositing what the group said was 2 1/2 tons of protest petitions with 7 million signatures from all over the world.
The packages of letters, sent by registered mail, were all addressed to Chirac at the Elysee Palace.
The hundreds of packages amounted to a huge headache for postal workers - and the government. In France, no postage is required for letters to the president.
"We expected Chirac to finally listen to the world protest," Greenpeace spokeswoman Fransce Verdeuzeldonk said. "Apparently he is deaf to that . . . and here behind me are 7 million witnesses who are, together with us, very angry."
The French government, however, appeared to be standing firm.
"The program provides for one test per month," Jacques Baumel, vice president of the French parliament's defense committee, said.
Chirac has pledged to halt all tests by next spring, then sign a global test ban treaty. France says the testing is needed to develop computer simulations that would make more tests unnecessary.
Police had prevented Greenpeace activists from delivering some of the petitions to Chirac's office in September, so the group decided to dump them at the post office, guaranteeing they would reach the Elysee Palace.
As police looked on, the activists unloaded the packages from six cars and a van and brought them into the post office, where officials scrambled to accommodate the mountains of mail by opening a special booth.
The signatures were collected in about 30 countries "from Japan to Colombia," said Greenpeace spokesman Jean-Luc Thierry.
Friday's explosion was about 60 kilotons, the equivalent of 60,000 tons of TNT, or three times the force of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. The Australian Geological Survey said it was as powerful as a magnitude 5.6 earthquake.
The first test was conducted Sept. 5 beneath Mururoa Atoll, 750 miles southeast of Tahiti. A second blast was set off Oct. 2 beneath neighboring Fangataufa Atoll. The tests break a 1992 moratorium on nuclear tests that had been honored by all declared nuclear powers except China.